Many orchestras have started their concerts with the Ukrainian anthem over the past two weeks. From now on, everyone, like all the producers, will tend to want to include works by Ukrainian composers in their programming. Valentin Silvestrov, 84, is its symbol and leader. Portrait.
Valentin Silvestrov, patriarch and figurehead of Ukrainian musical creation, whose music was conducted Monday evening during the Concert for Ukraine, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, is safe in Berlin. At 84, the composer was taken from kyiv to Germany via Poland on March 8th.
He was last Saturday at the pianist Elisaveta Blumina, with whom The duty entertained. “Valentin Silvestrov is in a house in Berlin for ten days, and we are trying to find him an apartment. The prospects are good,” says Elisaveta Blumina, who has known Silvestrov and his daughter for 14 years.
“He’s fine, he’s very fresh-minded, but we have to temporize. There, everyone wants something from him. For the moment, he has rather decided to decline everything. Even if we are going to play his work on Thursday at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, he will not go. »
A protester at heart
Valentin Silvestrov is an icon. Just as Sibelius once embodied Finland, Arvo Pärt is “the” Estonian composer, Peteris Vasks “the” Latvian, or Giya Kancheli (1935-2019) the musical voice of Georgia, Valentin Silvestrov is “the Ukrainian composer”.
It is a fact. In 2015, the Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv, regretting in an interview the “great lack of knowledge” about the “Ukrainian school of composition”, noted that the composer regularly performed is Valentin Silvestrov. She nevertheless drew attention to “many other composers who deserve recognition, such as Boris Lyatoshinsky, Vitaliy Gubarenko, Yevhen Stankovych, Myroslav Skoryk, Yuri Laniuk”.
Like Pärt, Vasks or Kancheli, Valentin Silvestrov has a singular voice. Moreover, during the time of the USSR, this voice earned him ostracism. He was in total opposition to “socialist realism”, not to mention that in 1968, he had made a name for himself by slamming the door of a meeting of composers to protest against the repression of the Prague Spring.
“I don’t write new music. My music is a response and an echo to what already exists”, he claims. We talked about conservatism, postmodernism, neoclassicism. But it’s something else: Silvestrov is sound, the rarefaction of sound and silence. The founding work is Silent Songs (1974-1977): 1h50 of melodies on texts by Pushkin, Lermontov, Essenin, Keats, Shelley and many others; an intimate musical bubble, translated by Alexei Martinov and Alexei Lubimov, incomparably superior to the artists of the ECM version who laminate the particular universe of the composer.
Composer’s Will
Silent Songs foreshadows this search for the echo of the world and time. “Silvestrov’s bubbling temperament is so in contrast to his silent music”, laughs Elisaveta Blumina, who has recorded an anthology of piano works with Grand Piano, including two Waltzes op. 153 that the composer dedicated to him. “A lot of works are alike. It’s his signature. In my record, the program of which we discussed, I wanted to vary the atmospheres. Silvestrov has his own style. He wanted pedal to the point that on some parts we sometimes put a big rock on it. He also wanted to close the piano lid to cover the sound. We ended up in a monastic atmosphere”, recalls the pianist, who is moved to think of this “inner voice” emanating from a composer who details his scores more and more. “He wants more and more to show his will as a composer, leaving less freedom to the interpreter. »
Silvestrov’s bubbling temperament is so in contrast to his quiet music. […] Many works are similar. It’s his signature. In my record, the program of which we discussed, I wanted to vary the atmospheres. Silvestrov has his own style.
Silvestrov, also promoted by Gidon Kremer and Alexei Lubimov for a long time, composed instrumental, orchestral and vocal music. We will hear it more and more. And that’s good.